Laurent Kabila

Laurent-Désiré Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who has been assassinated aged 61, was a cheerful, rubicund rogue, portly in middle age, who spent most of his life in exile, engaged in the illegal diamond trade and wild schemes to overthrow the dictatorship of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, his immediate predecessor. Along the way, he briefly recruited Che Guevara in 1965, and the armies of Uganda and Rwanda, which helped bring him to power in 1997.

Kabila's survival skills served him well in exile, but deserted him once he had moved into the presidential palace. He had hoped that his wide international contacts would enable him to play the role on the wider African stage that the intrinsic size and importance of Congo would seem to indicate. But political errors on the home front soon brought internal dissension, arguments with his foreign backers, and a return to Congo's endemic civil war. Soon, he was turning to other foreign friends with desperate appeals for military assistance. At his death, wide areas of the country were outside his government's control.

At the dawn of Congo's independence from Belgium in 1960, Kabila was one of the bright young men who might have become a star in his country's politics. Yet after the United Nations intervention and the 1961 assassination of the independence leader Patrice Lumumba, the cream of the radical Congolese were exiled. Kabila, who came from the secessionist southern province of Katanga, studied briefly in Paris and Belgrade, before returning home in 1963.

Briefly an elected assemblyman for North Katanga, when parliament was closed down later in the year, he joined with other Lumumbists in staging a widely-supported rebellion, backed by both the Chinese and the Russians, and half a dozen radical African states.

The rebellion attracted the attention of the United States, then panicking about possible Soviet gains in newly-independent Africa. Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance masterminded a plan that involved a coup to install a reliable western ally, Moise Tshombe. As well as weapons, the Americans recruited Belgian officers, exiled Cuban pilots, and white southern African mercenaries.

Kabila, who had established himself at Albertville (Kalemie), on the western shores of Lake Tanganyika, was soon forced by the mercenaries to retreat to the borders of Rwanda and Burundi. In Stanleyville (Kisangani), resistance was destroyed by Belgian paratroopers, airlifted in by a joint US-European operation in November 1964.

Forced to retreat, Kabila and his friends turned to the Cubans, and Che Guevara arrived on the Tanzanian-Congo border with a small contingent of guerrilla fighters in April 1965; Guevara recorded that Kabila "made an excellent impression", though he subsequently reconsidered this view.

Although Kabila appeared "quick and charming" - when he deigned to turn up - he was usually engaging in conspiratorial politics in Dar es Salaam, or negotiating with China's Chou En-lai or North Korea's Kim il-Sung. When he did meet Guevara, holed up on a bleak mountain-top, he came with ample supplies of whisky and bevies of attractive women. After six months, the rebellion petered out, the Cubans went home, Mobutu overthrew Tshombe, and Kabila began 30 years in the political wilderness.

He moved between Dar and Kampala, and made occasional forays into the Kivu region of Congo, re-establishing the "liberated zone" of which Guevara had dreamed, and funding his political activities by gold and ivory trading. Later, when finally driven from Congo, he made friends with Yoweri Museveni, then preparing to lead a rebel movement in Uganda.

Kabila did not reappear on the international stage until May 1997, when his forces captured Kinshasa after a 10-day campaign. He was greeted as a liberator as his rebels moved south, supported by the eastern Congo's Tutsis and Rwandan and Ugandan army units.

Mobutu fled before the fall of Kinshasa, and the new President Kabila renamed the country - Mobutu's Zaire - as the Democratic Republic of Congo, and indicated that he would follow in the footsteps of Museveni, who had created a liberal and competent Ugandan government. He then promptly fell out with his Uganda and Rwandan backers, who assisted a new Congolese rebellion in August 1998.

Ugandan-backed rebels again advanced from the north-eastern borders and threatened Kinshasa. Kabila invoked his friendship with Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia's erstwhile leftist governments, and their troops fought off the rebellion.

But the war continued and had an inevitable impact on his style of government. Deeply influenced by Congo's tragic history of foreign intervention, Kabila resurrected nostrums from his 1960s leftist past. He established a one-party state, promised - but never delivered - elections, and alienated foreign investors by refusing to make payments on the gigantic foreign debt of $14bn incurred by his profligate predecessor. He also ignored UN demands for an inquiry into the massacre of Rwandan refugees in eastern Congo in 1997.

Well-meaning brokers like Nelson Mandela sought to mediate an end to the war, but Kabila refused to take any notice. His mercurial temperament, and his ability to change sides, left him with few friends either at home or abroad. In the end, his early promise was dissipated in his futile attempt to retain Congo as his personal fiefdom, much as Mob-utu had done before him.

He is survived by his wife, and his son Joseph.

 Laurent-Désiré Kabila, politician, born November 27 1939; died January 17 2001